ICASAT 2025
Keynote Speakers
Agustín Rayo PhD
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
📍Pedro Ferriz Santa Cruz Planetarium and Immersion Center, also known as “El Péndulo”
📅 Date: October 1st | 🕑 Time: 11:30-12:30 hrs.
Keynote Lecture:
"The Social Challenges of Artificial Intelligence: A University Perspective"
Abstract:
Artificial intelligence represents an unprecedented technological breakthrough that is profoundly transforming the world we live in. This revolution brings with it significant social, economic, and human challenges. In this context, universities can play a key role in helping us face these challenges. In this talk, I will share some initiatives we are developing at MIT to address these issues.
About the speaker:
He is the current dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS). His research focuses on the intersection of the philosophy of logic and the philosophy of language. He has worked on the relationship between logic and mathematics and the limits of communicable thought. He is the author of numerous articles and two notable books: The Construction of Logical Space (Oxford University Press, 2013) and On the Brink of Paradox (MIT Press, 2019), the latter of which received the 2020 PROSE Award for Best Textbook in the Humanities. Rayo redesigned course 24.118 Paradox and Infinity, a class that explores topics at the intersection of philosophy and mathematics, taught in person and online. Before assuming his current role as dean of SHASS, he served as associate dean, interim dean, and head of house at one of MIT’s undergraduate dormitories.
Alfonso de la Torre Vega PhD
Secretaría de Marina (Mexican Navy), Government of Mexico
📍Pedro Ferriz Santa Cruz Planetarium and Immersion Center, also known as “El Péndulo”
📅 Date: October 3th | 🕑 Time: 14:00-15:00 hrs.
Keynote Lecture:
About speaker:
He holds a degree in Environmental Engineering from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) and a master’s degree in Metropolitan Planning and Policy, with over 20 years of experience in sustainability, waste management, and public policy. He was part of the winning team of the Ocean Hackathon 2021 with Vigías del Océano, a project to prevent marine litter from reaching the ocean across 263 coastal municipalities in Mexico. He has represented Mexico at international forums such as the UN Climate Change Conference (COP, Peru, 2014), RIO+20 (Brazil, 2012), and the UNIDO workshop on circular economy (Uruguay, 2019). He has also collaborated with UNESCO and UNEP and is a member of the UN Expert Group on Plastics and Microplastics. At UAM Azcapotzalco, he has held key roles in environmental management, civil protection, and waste research coordination. He authorizes several publications, including ¿A dónde irá nuestra basura? and Repensar la Cuenca. He was awarded the Ecological Merit Award (2010) and enhanced his training with a diploma in Marine Litter Management from the University of the Netherlands (2021).
Danielle Wood PhD
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
📍Pedro Ferriz Santa Cruz Planetarium and Immersion Center, also known as “El Péndulo”
📅 Date: October 1st | 🕑 Time: 10:00-11:00 hrs.
Keynote Lecture:
About speaker:
Professor Danielle Wood serves as an Assistant Professor in the Program in Media Arts & Sciences and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Within the Media Lab, Prof. Wood leads the Space Enabled Research Group which seeks to advance justice in Earth’s complex systems using designs enabled by space. Prof. Wood is a scholar of societal development with a background that includes satellite design, earth science applications, systems engineering, and technology policy. In her research, Prof. Wood applies these skills to design innovative systems that harness space technology to address development challenges around the world. Prior to serving as faculty at MIT, Professor Wood held positions at NASA Headquarters, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Aerospace Corporation, Johns Hopkins University, and the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs. Prof. Wood studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned a PhD in engineering systems, SM in aeronautics and astronautics, SM in technology policy, and SB in aerospace engineering.
David Rolnick PhD
School of Computer Science at McGill University and Mila
Quebec AI Institute
📍Pedro Ferriz Santa Cruz Planetarium and Immersion Center, also known as “El Péndulo”
📅 Date: October 2nd | 🕑 Time: 14:00-15:00 hrs.
Keynote Lecture:
"Tackling Climate Change with AI"
Abstract:
AI is increasingly being used to help tackle climate change, from optimizing electrical grids to emulating climate models and monitoring biodiversity. As such applications grow, however, it is becoming clear that high-powered AI tools often fall short. Methods designed using standard benchmarks may fail to capture the constraints or metrics of specific real-world problems, while a “one size fits all” approach ignores useful auxiliary information in particular applications. In this talk, we show how problem-centered design can lead to AI algorithms that are both methodologically innovative and highly impactful in the fight against climate change. We will also consider ways that AI contributes to climate change and how better to align the use of AI with climate goals.
About the speaker:
David Rolnick is an Assistant Professor and Canada CIFAR AI Chair in the School of Computer Science at McGill University and at Mila – Quebec AI Institute. He is a Co-founder and Chair of Climate Change AI and serves as Scientific Co-director of Sustainability in the Digital Age and co-lead of the Global Center on AI and Biodiversity Change (ABC). Dr. Rolnick is a Sloan Research Fellow and an AI2050 Early Career Fellow and was named to the MIT Technology Review’s 2021 list of “35 Innovators Under 35” for his work in building the field of AI and climate change. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from MIT and is a former Fulbright Scholar, NSF Graduate Research Fellow, and NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow.
Miguel Alcubierre Moya PhD
📍Pedro Ferriz Santa Cruz Planetarium and Immersion Center, also known as “El Péndulo”
📅 Date: October 3th | 🕑 Time: 16:00-17:00 hrs.
Keynote Lecture:
"Gravitational waves"
Abstract:
Albert Einstein proposed the theory of general relativity in late 1915. One of its main predictions is the existence of gravitational waves—disturbances in spacetime that travel at the speed of light and are produced by violent astrophysical phenomena such as supernova explosions or black hole collisions. However, gravitational waves are so weak that detecting them took more than 100 years. Their first detection occurred in September 2015 by the LIGO observatory and resulted from the collision of two black holes. In 2017, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three individuals who made decisive contributions to the LIGO project. More than 100 confirmed detections of black hole collisions have been recorded. In late 2017, the first detection of a neutron star collision was announced. On that occasion, a gamma-ray burst was detected simultaneously for the first time, along with subsequent observations across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. In this talk, I will briefly introduce the concept of gravitational waves and highlight the exciting results related to the first detections and the Nobel Prize.
Department of Gravitation and Field Theory
Institute of Nuclear Sciences, UNAM
About the speaker:
He is a researcher at the Institute of Nuclear Sciences at UNAM, where he also served as director from 2012 to 2020. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in Physics from the Faculty of Sciences at UNAM (1988 and 1990, respectively) and his Ph.D. from the University of Wales, United Kingdom (1994). He conducted research stays at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany. His work focuses on numerical relativity, gravitational waves, black holes, dark matter, and alternative theories of gravitation. He is internationally recognized for proposing the Alcubierre metric, a theoretical model for faster-than-light travel inspired by Star Trek and associated with the concept of Warp Drive. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in general relativity, theoretical physics, and numerical methods and is also an active science communicator through public lectures, interviews, and a TEDx talk. He has received numerous honors, including the Medal of Merit in Science (2009) and the Medal from the World Organization for Pro-Consciousness (2024). He has led several research projects funded by CONAHCyT, DGAPA, and PAPIIT, focused on relativity, gravitational waves, and dark matter.
Patricia Hernández Reséndiz PhD
Astrofísicos en Acción
📍Pedro Ferriz Santa Cruz Planetarium and Immersion Center, also known as “El Péndulo”
📅 Date: October 1st | 🕑 Time: 14:00-15:00 hrs.
Keynote Lecture:
"Experimental Astrophysics"
Abstract:
For many people, astrophysicists can be observational or theoretical, or they can do instrumentation, but these are not the only paths through which research in astrophysics can be conducted. Experimentation is essential to the work in this area of knowledge, as it helps constrain the mathematical models that attempt to explain the cosmos and more accurately characterize celestial bodies. In the talk, we will examine two examples on which I based my astronomical research.
About the speaker:
She holds a degree in Physics from the Faculty of Sciences at UNAM and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the same institution. In 2015, UNAM’s Graduate Program in Astrophysics awarded her the Alfonso Caso Medal. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León in Monterrey. Her research focuses on asteroid polarization and the formation of the Solar System. She also teaches Astrobiology. Since 2009, she has worked as a science communicator, workshop facilitator, speaker, entrepreneur, and YouTube content creator. She co-founded Astrofísicos en Acción, the first public, multiplatform science communication company dedicated to bringing astronomy to all of Latin America in an original, fun, and accessible way. Committed to equity in science, she advocates for greater participation of women in STEM fields and shares a deep passion for the arts.
Sai Ravela PhD
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
📍Pedro Ferriz Santa Cruz Planetarium and Immersion Center, also known as “El Péndulo”
📅 Date: October 3th | 🕑 Time: 9:00-10:00 hrs.
Keynote Lecture:
"Smart, Sparse, Scalable: Co-Active Intelligence for Climate Extremes and Sustainability"
Abstract:
Co-optimizing adaptation and mitigation for sustainability is fundamentally a problem of decision-making under non-stationary uncertainty. Extreme, episodic events—such as cyclones, heatwaves, and floods—or the sudden emergence of tipping points can disrupt carefully prepared strategies assuming a gradual mean climate state drift. Quantifying extreme risk demands resolving fine-scale dynamics and statistical tails, a challenge for both modeling and observation. Climate models fail for rare, high-impact events, while dense environmental monitoring, such as routine soil moisture, is challenging.
In the first part of this talk, I will introduce a strategy for generating and resolving extreme weather events such as cyclones. I propose a novel stochastic process for coherent fluids to create large catalogs of synthetic extreme events, integrating statistics, physics, and foundation models to generate high-resolution fields. This hybrid AI-physics model co-actively maps coarse climate models to fine-scale observations, assures physical consistency, overcomes data scarcity prevalent at extremes, and is applicable to future climate scenarios.
In the second part, I will address the model complexity challenge in hybrid AI-physics systems, where over-parameterization is common, limiting generalizability and interpretability. I will introduce an approach based on stochastic learning dynamics, in which an ensemble approximation to the Fokker-Planck equation tractably enables the co-active optimization of neural structure and function.
Finally, I will generalize the Co-Active Systems framework, demonstrating how feedback between models, data, theory, and experts enables parsimony for efficient knowledge acquisition and resilient representations. Arguing that parsimony is fundamental to both modeling and observation, I will, time permitting, discuss emerging opportunities in quantum computation for parsimony as a transformative future direction.
About the speaker:
He is a Principal Research Scientist in MIT’s Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences Department and directs the Earth Signals and Systems Group (ESSG). He pioneers a co-active systems theory that exploits feedback between theory, data, models, and experts through uncertainty, information, and parsimony for stochastic, high-dimensional earth, planet, climate, and life processes. He applies these methods to climate risk and sustainability, co-active observing systems, the physics of learning, statistical inference for coherent signals, fluid imaging, and image recognition for conservation. He received MIT’s 2016 Infinite Kilometer Award for pioneering work on statistical approaches to coherent fluids and co-founded Windrisktech LLC, the first company to model cyclone-induced future climate risks. He has advised numerous students, authored many papers, and teaches the popular Dynamics, Optimization, and Learning Systems class. Dr. Ravela holds a PhD in Computer Science (Computer Vision & Robotics) from UMass Amherst (2003) and trained at MIT as a postdoctoral researcher in Stochastic Processes and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (2004), where he remains.
Rodrigo Ortega Toro PhD
University of Cartagena
📍Pedro Ferriz Santa Cruz Planetarium and Immersion Center, also known as “El Péndulo”
📅 Date: October 2nd | 🕑 Time: 9:00-10:00 hrs.
Keynote Lecture:
"Development of various biodegradable materials from agro-industrial resources"
Abstract:
The generation of agro-industrial waste and the environmental impact of conventional plastics have driven the development of biodegradable materials as a sustainable alternative. This presentation addresses the use of agro-industrial resources for the formulation of various biodegradable materials, with an emphasis on their potential application in food packaging. It discusses different polymeric matrices derived from starch, cellulose, and proteins, as well as formulations that incorporate active compounds with antioxidant, antimicrobial, and pH-indicating properties. The processing methods considered include traditional techniques such as casting, extrusion, and compression molding, with a particular focus on the use of reactive extrusion to promote in situ structural modifications. The developed materials have been characterized in terms of their physical, chemical, and microbiological properties, showing significant improvements through the use of polymer blends, crosslinking agents, and multilayer structures. Additionally, studies are presented that demonstrate the effect of incorporating by-products and plant extracts, which enhance the functionality of the bioplastics. This approach helps reduce environmental impact, comply with emerging regulations, and add value to agricultural and fishery waste, establishing a comprehensive strategy for a circular economy in the biodegradable packaging sector.
About the speaker:
He holds a degree in Agroindustrial Engineering from the University of Cauca and obtained his master’s and doctoral degrees in Food Science, Technology, and Management from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain). He is currently a full-time professor at the University of Cartagena, affiliated with the Food Engineering Program. He is an expert in biomaterials and the utilization of agro-industrial waste for the development of materials and additives with potential applications in various industries, including food, food packaging, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, water purification, and biomedicine. Prof. Dr. Ortega is the author of over 130 articles published in indexed journals and has participated in more than 50 scientific conferences. He is also the director of the research group Food Packaging and Shelf Life (FP&SL) and a Senior Researcher recognized by the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation of Colombia.